26 Oct 2025
We want to move Ruby forward
On September 9, without warning, Ruby Central kicked out the maintainers who have cared for Bundler and RubyGems for over a decade. Ruby Central made these changes against the established project policies, while ignoring all objections from the maintainers’ team. At the time, Ruby Central claimed these changes were “temporary". However,
- None of the “temporary” changes made by Ruby Central have been undone, more than six weeks later.
- Ruby Central still has not communicated with the removed maintainers about restoring any permissions.
- Ruby Central still has not offered “operator agreements” or “contributor agreements” to any of the removed maintainers.
- The Ruby Together merger agreement plainly states that it is the maintainers who will decide what is best for their projects, not Ruby Central.
- Last week, Matz stepped in to assume control of RubyGems and Bundler himself. His announcement states that the Ruby core team will assume control and responsibility for the primary RubyGems and Bundler GitHub repository.
- Ruby Central did not communicate with any removed maintainers before transferring control of the rubygems/rubygems GitHub repo to the Ruby core team.
- On October 24th, Shan publicly confirmed she does not believe the maintainers need to be told why they were removed.
While we know that Ruby Central had no right to act the way they did, it is nevertheless clear to us that the Ruby community will be better off if the codebase, maintenance, and legal rights to RubyGems and Bundler are all together in the same place.
To bring this about, we are prepared to transfer our interests in RubyGems and Bundler to Matz, end the dispute over the GitHub enterprise account, 2 GitHub organizations, and 70 repositories, and hand over all rights in the Bundler logo and Bundler name, including the trademark applications in the US, EU, and Japan.
Once we have entered into a legal agreement to settle any legal claims with Ruby Central and transfer all rights to Matz, the former maintainers will step back entirely from the RubyGems and Bundler projects, leaving them fully and completely to Matz, and by extension to the entire Ruby community.
Although Ruby Central’s actions were not legitimate, our commitment to the Ruby community remains strong. We’re choosing to focus our energy on projects to improve Ruby for everyone, including rv, Ruby Butler, jim, and gem.coop.
Signed,
The former maintainers: André, David, Ellen, Josef, Martin, and Samuel